One of the largest toy companies in the world with an annual turnover of billions of dollars.

Lego is Danish for "Play Well"

Lego is Latin for "I Put Together"

LEGO's brand recognition is the same as that of the Disney Company.

The Lego company encourages "Free Form Play" which is about getting the child to be creative in what they build. Although recently it has begun to produce licenced, themed toys such as "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter". Lego Loyalists consider this to be sacrilegious behaviour by the company.

At the LEGO Company, toy blocks are the building blocks of success. Since 1949 the Danish firm has made more than 200 billion of its interlocking plastic toys, keeping little hands and imaginations busy around the globe. In a nod to kids' high-tech skills, it also offers LEGO kits to build PC-programmable robots (including Spybotics and Mindstorms), and its BIONICLE line features an evolving story line on the Internet and a variety of merchandising opportunities. The company also owns LEGO theme parks (in California, Denmark, Germany, and the UK), as well as LEGO retail outlets in the US and Europe.

Lego formed a partnership with MIT in 1984, and it endowed a professorship in the MIT Media Lab in 1989 -- but it didn't produce the "intelligent brick" until 1998. Despite the popularity of the programmable brick, Lego has been unable to bring the price down and turn it into a mass-market product.

Today, Lego rivals Bridgestone and Goodyear to produce the most tires in the world -- making upward of 175 million tires per year.